Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  LUNA: Sir, please tell me your name.

  CALLER: No. Good-bye.

  The call ended one minute and twenty seconds after it started. Luna typed up a message that was transmitted to the first responders for calls of an urgent nature. Luna was a very thorough operator, one who’d been honored for her attention to detail with two Starbucks cards and a potted hibiscus from her manager.

  She typed the details of the call into the report and added: Caller was almost inaudible. Not sure if male or female. When I asked for an ID, which he/she refused, there was a long pause. During that pause I heard the sound of someone else talking. Maybe the radio. Not sure. That’s all.

  The tip from the informant or witness had yielded a grisly discovery as a team of CSIs, Pierce County Sheriff ’s Department officers, and two homicide detectives from Tacoma gathered around the edge of the lazy Puyallup River, just east of Tacoma’s gritty downtown. Three-foot-tall grass and a noxious weed called tansy ragwort had drawn a partial curtain around where the body had been put to rest. As a cacophony of crows hurled their calls through the air, the group of men and women went about their tasks. Some took photos. Some ran the length of a tape measure. Others merely secured the scene. There was no question when Grace Alexander laid eyes on the figure that they were looking at the remains of Lisa Lancaster.

  Or rather, most of Lisa.

  While the sum of her body parts had been laid out in a hellish repose, they were in pieces. Lisa was all there, but she’d been butchered with the kind of hideous brutality that could only be the work of a madman.

  And not a very skillful one at that.

  Grace kneeled down next the victim. Her eyes carefully tracing the tentative cuts that had severed her right arm.

  “Look,” she said, “he hesitated a little.”

  “Yeah, I see that.” It was Paul Bateman, who had joined her while the medical examiner pushed everyone else away from the scene.

  “Found some cigarette butts. Bagged and tagged.”

  “Saw it,” she said. “Did you get the fishing bait bag?”

  “Yeah, but I doubt anyone would kill someone here and go on fishing.”

  Grace’s eyes stayed on the body. “Probably not. But maybe this is a favorite place. A good place he thought to hide her. I mean, it is a good place in a way. It isn’t that far off River Road. Anyone could just go by and miss her.”

  It was true. More than a thousand cars passed that spot per hour, as people commuted to jobs in Tacoma or the Puyallup Valley. The only thing that brought any solace to the tragic scene was the fact that, however long Lisa had lain there, she had not been alive. She had not been one of those victims who were stashed alongside the road trying to summon the strength to call for help. Grace thought of the case of the California woman who’d crawled to the roadside after being left for dead—her arms severed from her body, but her will indomitable. Lisa Lancaster hadn’t had that chance.

  Lisa had never said a word. Her final words, her final screams, had likely been given in a place where no one could see her, hear her. There was very little blood around the body. It was obvious that she’d bled out somewhere else.

  Grace could feel the bile in her stomach rise. A sick person like the one who’d done this had probably savored her last breath as though it was something to enjoy. To revel in. What lay in pieces in the tangle of weeds just above the muddy riverbank had been brought there and reassembled.

  “Hey!” a Pierce County deputy called from a tangle of brambles. “Got something over here.”

  Grace stayed with the body, while Paul went in the direction of the deputy. He was a young officer, a total newbie. It was easy to spot those. They still allowed the excitement of finding a piece of evidence come to their faces.

  “Plastic garbage bag,” the kid said. “Looks like blood on it.”

  Paul nodded. “Good work. Now, please step back.”

  It was a black Hefty bag, the heavy-duty kind that Paul had used when his ex, Lynnette, threw him out and told him to get his stuff out of the house. He shook his head. He hated how thoughts of Lynnette infiltrated his mind all the time. Having to see her every day at work was bad enough, but having even the most common objects recall some incident with her was beyond cruel.

  The black bag had been carried out into the water and tossed into the brambles about twenty-five yards from where the killer had deposited Lisa, bit by bit. It was hard to tell in the flat light among the Himalayan blackberries if there was blood on the bag, but from where Paul Bateman stood it appeared that there could be. If so, the bag was a monumental discovery and a major mistake by the perpetrator. Plastic bags held latent prints. Trace evidence from the killer’s vehicle could easily adhere to the sticky, bloody plastic. If this was the bag he’d brought ninety-five-pound Lisa Lancaster in to reassemble on the riverbank then it also had topped its manufacture’s promise of holding “up to seventy-five pounds without tearing.”

  Grace joined Paul by the thorny vines.

  “They’re transporting her now,” she said.

  Paul pointed to the bag. “Techs will process this and the cigarette butts. Are you sure it’s Lisa?” he asked, his eyes unblinking.

  “Sure enough that we better get over to Ms. Lancaster’s before the press does.”

  CHAPTER 12

  It was almost dark when the detectives arrived at the Lancaster house. Grace scanned the street for any of the usual suspects—the press, that is. Thankfully, there weren’t any. One vehicle did catch her eye. Marty Keillor’s souped-up Honda Accord was parked behind Ms. Lancaster’s car.

  “Marty’s here,” Paul said. “Hope we don’t wake ’em up.”

  “Enough of that,” Grace said, though she’d thought the same thing.

  “Just saying,” he said.

  Catherine Lancaster opened the door. She was wearing a white cotton blouse and jeans. It didn’t escape Grace’s eyes that the second button from the bottom was unfastened.

  “Is it true?” she asked, her voice trying to find a breath. Her eyes were ablaze with a curious mix of anger and fear.

  While both detectives knew to what she was referring, they didn’t give any indication. A rookie would blurt out that they’d found a body when the mother might only have asked if it was true that they’d eaten at the local Sonic. Never, ever give up any information first. Always, both knew, wait and see what the subject is really talking about.

  “What?” Paul asked.

  “I heard that someone found a body,” she said.

  Marty Keillor appeared behind her.

  “Is it Lisa?” he asked.

  “May we come inside?” Grace asked, and Lisa’s mother opened the door wide to allow them entrance into the living room. She stopped them with a cry.

  “I knew she was dead!” she said. “I knew it in my bones. My girl’s gone. My only baby! Gone!”

  “Ms. Lancaster,” Paul said, trying to calm her.

  “Are you going to tell me everything is going to be okay? Maybe you’d know how I feel if this had ever happened to you. Lisa is gone.” She glanced at Marty. “Except for Marty, I’m alone.”

  The remark was strange. Why acknowledge Marty as her boyfriend now? If that was, in fact, what she was doing?

  “We aren’t sure it is her,” Grace said. “The medical examiner will be analyzing”—she stopped herself short of saying the body or body parts, which sounded as horrific as it really indeed was—“analyzing the, uh, evidence.”

  By then Ms. Lancaster was inconsolable. Marty Keillor slumped silently into the sofa where Lisa’s mother had sunk in a sobbing heap. On the coffee table adjacent to the sofa were an ashtray and a stack of laser prints with images of beaches and tropical flowers, printouts from a travel website.

  As the detectives left the house, Paul leaned close to Grace’s ear.

  “Looks like Ms. Lancaster and Marty were planning a vacation.”

  “Saw that,” she said, walking down the driveway a few yards before stopping. She
started for the pair of galvanized garbage cans that sat next to the curb.

  “What are you doing? Dumpster diving at a time like this?”

  “Hardly,” she said, prying off one of the lids and peering inside. “Look here,” she said, hoisting up a half-full black plastic bag. “Look familiar?”

  Paul shrugged a little. “Like who doesn’t use those bags?”

  “I admit Shane and I use them, too, but let’s bring this in to the lab to see if they are the same manufacturing lot as the one recovered from the scene.”

  “You really don’t think that Ms. Lancaster and that creepola Marty offed Lisa,” he said.

  “Maybe. You saw the printouts on the table.”

  “Maui does sound nice,” he said.

  She nodded. “Yeah, a great place to run away to.”

  “Okay, so the daughter’s ex-boyfriend is shagging her mother,” Paul said. “Disgusting on all grounds, but why kill her? If anyone should have been hacked up it would have been Party Marty.”

  Grace smiled grimly at the mention of the nickname Naomi had given Lisa’s ex.

  “Agreed. There something more going on here,” she said. “Maybe there’s a conspiracy here? Maybe Mom was mad at Lisa.”

  “She said she was a saint on that TV news report.”

  Grace glanced back at the house. “She oversold that, didn’t she? The guilty often overdo it when it comes to lauding the victim.”

  “Right. But why kill the girl?”

  Grace opened the trunk and put the plastic bag and its smelly contents inside. “Maybe there was a money reason.”

  A money reason. Aside from jealousy and rage, money was the most frequent flash point for crimes that led to murder. People killed because they had too little money. Because they were afraid someone would take some of their money. Sometimes they killed for profit. Although children were rarely murdered by their parents for insurance proceeds, there had been cases in which that had occurred. Indeed, more than one wary insurance salesperson had begrudgingly sold a policy in the tens of thousands on a child whose earning power—the measure of a person’s worth—was nil. How they slept at night was beyond Grace Alexander’s comprehension. In one notorious Northwest case, a couple purchased nearly a million dollars on the life of a child who later died in a terrible and suspicious house fire.

  The kicker there was the little girl had been adopted only seven months before the fire swept through the couple’s house in Yelm, southeast of Tacoma. Law enforcement speculated that they had adopted the girl only to kill her for the insurance money. The case could never be proved and National Life had to make good on its policy. The couple took the proceeds and disappeared, leaving observers to wonder if they’d do it again somewhere else.

  Could Lisa’s mother be one of those coldhearted people? By all accounts she was a devoted nurse, a caring soul whose compassion for others knew no limits. Why was she sleeping with her daughter’s ex? Why was she going to take a trip to Maui? And if she wasn’t the worst kind of a mother in the world, was Party Marty the ultimate evil?

  CHAPTER 13

  It was after 7 PM when Diana Rose returned home from work. The day had been brutal; as of late, that was more a common occurrence than a rarity. She’d spent two hours at the church before going to her class at Annie Wright. Mocha was waiting for her by the back door and she bent down to give the cat a little attention before setting her purse on the counter. She made a face when she noticed that Emma hadn’t put out the frozen chicken to thaw. She’d have to microwave it and that was always risky. More often than not, she’d learned over the years, defrosting meat semi-cooked it.

  “Emma?” she called up the stairs. She noticed the cat’s bowl was empty, so she filled it with water.

  No answer.

  She went upstairs and opened the bedroom door. The room was such a mess. Like always. The bed was unmade, a tangle of clothes were heaped on the floor, and dishes were stacked on the nightstand.

  Diana speed-dialed her daughter, but it went right to voice mail, a surefire sign that Emma had let the battery run down again.

  She punched in the speed dial number for Starbucks.

  “Hi,” she said, “this is Diana Rose. Can I speak to Emma?”

  “Hi, Ms. Rose. This is Devon, her manger. She’s not here. We tried calling her phone, but no answer.”

  Diana was confused. “What do you mean, not here?”

  “She’s two hours late. She didn’t even call to let us know. Really had us in a bind.”

  “Are you sure she was supposed to be in today?” Diana asked, trying to stave off the uneasiness that had started to sweep over her. She found herself sinking onto her daughter’s crumpled linens on the edge of the bed.

  “Must have missed the bus,” Devon said, picking up on the mother’s anxiety.

  “Maybe,” Diana said. “Maybe one, but there are buses every half hour. She’d have to have missed at least three or four. That’s not possible. I’m really worried, Devon.”

  The sound of coffee grinder churned in the background.

  “I’ll let you know,” Devon said. “We’re super short-staffed today. Besides Emma, I have another no-show today. Gotta go.”

  “Wait!” Diana said, nearly yelling into the phone.

  “What? I’m, like, super busy.”

  “Call me as soon as she gets in.”

  “Okay. Will do. Thank you for calling Starbucks.”

  It was early evening when Diana phoned her husband, Emma’s stepfather. Dan Walton answered on the first ring. From the background sound, it was obvious he was in his car heading home.

  “Need something from the store?” he asked.

  “Honey, Emma didn’t show up for work today. I don’t think she came home last night, either.”

  “What do you mean, didn’t come home?”

  She looked around the room. “I really can’t tell for sure, but I called Starbucks and they said she didn’t make it to work today. We have to call the police. We have to find out where she is. This isn’t like her. Something bad happened to her. I know it.”

  “Calm down,” Dan said. “I’ll be home in five minutes. I’m sure she’s okay.”

  “Hurry,” she said. “Please, Dan. Get here as fast as you can. Something is very, very wrong. I’m her mother. I feel it.”

  Dan promised he would. He dialed 911 and explained the possible emergency to the dispatcher. He gave his address and said he was headed home.

  “My wife is there now,” he said, running a hard yellow light—something Cautious Dan would never have done. “I’ll be there in three minutes.”

  “We’ll send a car out,” the dispatcher said.

  Dan Walton had an uneasy feeling, too.

  At 6:45 a Tacoma police officer named Antonio Lorenzo knocked on the Roses’ front door. He was a young officer, barely thirty. He had warm eyes and an instantly soothing countenance that no doubt served him well responding to calls such as the one made by Dan Walton.

  “Let’s back up a little,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on with your daughter.”

  “Emma didn’t show up for work today,” Diana said, her words coming out in quick gulps. She hadn’t cried yet, but Officer Lorenzo could easily see she was on the verge.

  “May I come inside?” he asked.

  “Yes, please,” Dan said. “I’m Dan Walton. This is my wife, Diana. Our daughter is Emma Rose. We didn’t see her last night after work and they said she didn’t show up today.”

  Officer Lorenzo had a kind, calm face, which in that moment and in the hundreds of others that preceded it, was put to good use.

  “Is this unusual for Emma?”

  Diana’s face tightened. Not facelift smoothed out, but stretched with worry. “Very. Of course it is. We wouldn’t have called the police if it was commonplace, now would we?”

  Dan, now sitting next to his wife on the sofa facing the officer, who’d taken a seat on the brown leather recliner in the living room, put his hand on he
r knee. He patted her a few times to remind her to stay calm. Thinking the worst was ludicrous. Their daughter was a good girl. An environmentalist. A great student. If she’d gone off somewhere they were going to hear from her.

  “Are you sure she didn’t come home last night?” the officer asked.

  “I didn’t hear her come in. I’m a very, very light sleeper,” Diana said.

  Officer Lorenzo made some notes.

  “Are all of you getting along?” he asked, his voice soft and nonjudgmental.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Dan asked.

  “Just asking. Just need to know if there were any problems here at home. Were all of you getting along with Emma?”

  Dan leaned closer. His brow narrowed. He didn’t want to be angry just then, but the implication of the police officer’s words seemed directed at him.

  “Do you mean to suggest she’s run away, left home?”

  “Did she, Dan?”

  “There would be no reason I could think she would do that. She is our only child and we’re a very close family,” Dan said, still stiff with resentment.

  “My husband is right. We are extremely close. Sometimes too close, I think. Emma didn’t go to college this year because of my illness.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m cancer free now,” she said. “But the past couple of years have been rough and Em didn’t want me to go through it all on my own. Even though the surgery was a year ago and I’m fine, she just decided to postpone college for a year. Does that sound like a girl who would run away?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” the officer said. “Is it possible that all the responsibility became too much for her and she needed a break?”

  “But I am fine now! Look at me! My daughter even got me Mocha when she’s so allergic because she knows how much I love cats,” Diana said, looking over at Mocha as the furry feline wandered across the living room floor, her dust mop tail pointing upright like a skunk’s.